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[INTERVIEW] Fable III Coming in DL Episodes Confirmed at SXSW
http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/xbox-360/2010/03/23/peter-molyneux-fable-3-and-emotional-games/1
One of the best interviews yet, although that episode thing seems sketchy and big memory usage
bit-file said:Fable 3 and Emotional Games
South by Southwest 2010 While a lot of the speakers at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) were up-and-coming coders and designers, there were a few more established visionaries at the show, including one Peter Molyneux. One of the most successful British game designers ever, Molyneux got his start in the early 80s distributing games on tape, but real fame came with Bullfrog Productions, the studio he co-founded in 1987.
Bullfrog’s games – including Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper – remain some of the most influential games ever created, and their focus on economics and god-like management of a whole world are still popular ideas in today’s titles. Bullfrog was eventually bought out by EA, and Molyneux went on to found Lionhead, develop two Black & White games and see the studio be acquired by Microsoft. Since then he's taken up a role as Creative Director of Microsoft Games Studio Europe, helming the two Fable games.
There’s no doubting what he’s accomplished, but he’s faced criticism too, thanks to his tendency to over-promise on the features his games will include – something explored in Zero Punctuation’s review of Fable. Still, even the acerbic Yahtzee settled on describing Molyneux as “over ambitious” – hardly the worst criticism in the world and something that perhaps games are in need of. True to form, at SXSW, Molyneux was interviewed by Frank Rose of Wired, in a session called ‘The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart?’ – a question typical of his ambitious and intellectual approach to gaming...
FR: What interests you about emotions in games?
PM: I’ve always had this overwhelming urge to be involved. When you watch a film, you think why does the baddy have to lose? In James Bond, I always thought it’s so unfair, it must have taken ages to build that base and think of the staffing costs! I suppose want it [the story] to turn out my way and that’s a passion of mine. I did a game called Black & White, all about this realisation that part of the world could be down to you. The hype exploded, it went out of control, but it showed [there was] a huge interest in those emotional things.
FR: What do you think about movies?
PM: In one way, I’m very reverential towards them – but they feel slightly old school to me. In four, five years time games will really be allowing you to choose your outcome and that’s something movies cannot do - that they can never do. By definition we have to sit there and soak it up like passive robots. A lot of Hollywood characters seem slightly staid because they’re so focus grouped, too
The Hero’s Journey
Molyneux then moved on to talk about how games tell stories and how they differ from films – a topic we’ve looked at recently here on bit-tech. Molyneux discussed the influential ‘Hero’s Journey’ theory which carries a lot of currency in Hollywood.
The Hero’s Journey is based on the work of Joseph Campbell, who analysed a number of major myths from around the world, and concluded that they all shared the same master structure, where an everyman hero is compelled to leave his normal life and go on an adventurous journey to find fulfilment and bring balance back to the world.
It’s a fascinating theory and once you’ve got the gist of it, it’s extremely interesting to see how it’s applied in films – even in ones with chopped up narratives such as Pulp Fiction. Molyneux explained it very briefly, and then talked about how he wanted to engage with the Hero’s Journey in the next Fable game.
PM: Lot of films are constructed around the Hero’s Journey, and what I wanted to experiment with in Fable 3 was why not make half the game the Hero’s Journey – and the other half what happens next. This is unashamed promotion, I apologise. In Fable 3 you start off as a rebel, there’s a guy doing awful terrible things to the land of Albion, and you go on a path to take out this evil king, and become a king yourself.
Once you’ve done that, what do you do next? You can eliminate starvation or you can double it, you can empty the treasury or fill it with gold and rub it all over your body? Making your own rules is interesting because what we want is control and power over our lives and I think computer games can help us do that.
You’re a rebel and being this rebel, you need to get people to follow you, and they’ll do it if you promise to do certain things – you have to sign a piece of paper. One pledge, for instance, is to do with health, and you promise to stop this bad situation, but after you become King you realise you can’t keep all these promises because you only have a certain amount of gold in your treasury. So, it’s a case of which promises are most important to you.
FR: So, is there going to be a dog?
PM: The dog [in Fable 2] was there to give people something to care about. In so many games there’s nothing to care about or be emotionally involved with. So, we played the cheapest trick on you – a cute dog, with sad puppy eyes – and you know what, It really worked. At one point there were three women outside the [Lionhead] office with placards saying ‘do not kill the dog!’ So, it worked. We’re bringing the dog back, but it was too well behaved before – part of the fun of dogs is they misbehave and can be enormously embarrassing to the owner. The dog also ties into this new emotional connection in the game called touch.
FR: How does that work?
PM: We really want to tell a meaningful and deep story in Fable 3, so we have an amazing cast of actors – John Cleese, Stephen Fry – and some other huge names we’ll reveal later on, and that helps take us one step closer to this emotional story. It’s not just the craft and the pace that’s important, it’s giving people tangible things you can touch, and the dog helps here. It’s the ability to have your character reach out at any time and touch things. You can shake people’s hands, you can hug them, too.
We were inspired by the American man hug - although please don’t do it with British people, we find the closeness of the genitalia really frightening.
Fable 3 in action
At this point, Molyneux and assistants fire up a closely guarded Xbox 360 to demonstrate Fable 3. It’s set around 60 years on from the second game, and the world of Albion has undergone its own industrial revolution. The scene shows the main character on a cobbled, lamp-lit street.
Molyneux shows you can pick up your daughter, or take her hand and walk her through the city; while this happens, she’s still an AI-driven character – when he tried to walk her into the pub, she giggles and says “Dad, that’s silly, I can’t go in there.” Next, he shows off a darker side of the touch mechanic, taking a beggar by the hand. “He thinks I’m taking him home to meet my family, Molyneux explains, “but actually, I’m going to sell him into a slavery at one of the factories.”
PM: You can see, as soon as you give the power [to the in game character] to reach out, touch and embrace, it makes a really big difference. It’s so much more intimate than just pressing X – because you physically have to drag him there, it’s so much more involving. There are so many times when entertainment, a film or something, hits us like a tidal wave and then it just goes. If you own your own touches, if you’re making them, then you’re so much more likely to remember them.
FR: So you’ve said Fable 3 is going to use Natal?
PM: We’ve been working on Natal for some time – we created Milo for the first demo – and we’d be crazy not to integrate the two. I have to be careful what I say, there are PR policeman in the audience with sniper rifles… Natal is a fantastic amazing device because it’s so new and different. It makes designers like me sweat like never before. We were getting lazy, tweaking people’s thumbs for 20 years. A button does this, it’s all so standard. We, as an industry, we have failed, to some extent, to create a unique form of entertainment and Natal makes you [as a games designer] think again.
You still need a controller to play Fable 3 but there are places in the world where you can use Natal, where it’s cute, funny, engaging. You don’t need it but it does enable an enhanced Fable 3.
FR: What appealed to you about this industrial revolution setting?
PM: We’ve always had a feel for Fable as a game that’s got a big story, that starts in King Arthurs time and goes through this big arc so in some ways we’re [just] playing out that, but I’ve often thought it would be brilliant to be walking through Charles Dickens’ London. It was such a dark place and very episodic too – so we’re doing that with Fable 3, we’ll give you the first big episodes, and you’ll be able to download new episodes, which is analogous to the way Dickens wrote.
[Molyneux goes on to talk about the levels of internet awareness in the game] Some of the shops in Albion are linked to the internet, and every so often, populated by stuff from Lionhead. You don’t have to go out to some horrible dashboard and download the Armageddon Pack 5.
FR: How did you research the game?
PM: We looked at some of the great rebels, like Che Guevara, some of the great monarchs and dictators, Henry VIII and Stalin. Henry VIII spent five per cent of the entire national income on his own personal wine cellar. No wonder he died of syphilis. He was terribly corrupt. We saw there was this theme throughout history, that people will promise pretty much anything on the way to becoming ruler, and drop these when they’re in power.
FR: You’ve talked a lot about immersion – how immersive can games really get?
PM: At best playing a game is like looking through a security window where you can’t touch anything – we’d love to break through that window. We have a long way to go before we can make characters who are really like you – or who like you, love you – how would that make you feel? We’re explorers who have just discovered this new continent of emotion.
FR: Don Quixote lost his mind getting too obsessed and too immersed in the novels he read. Can games be too immersive?
PM: My vision is imagine if we could have a really joyful experience. What we showed at E3 with Milo, it’s a little crack in that. We can make something wonderful and joyful. Games can be as full and rich as films and books and there are multitudes of ways of executing that, which a lot of computer games haven’t even touched upon. It’s very rare to have a romantic interest in game for instance, yet very rare in movies for that not to be there.
One of the best interviews yet, although that episode thing seems sketchy and big memory usage
